The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County Part 15

Sal finished the thought for her. "She'l never change. It's the law of inertia. You just can't alter something that big."

Vi giggled. "You mean someone."

Sal just shrugged, as if to say what's the difference, and I guess she had a point, but she was wrong about the law of inertia. You can throw something huge off course, and it doesn't always take something-or someone-big to do it.

Interesting results can be achieved with very little effort. Sometimes, al it takes is the smal est push from a pair of damaged hands to make even the driest bulb burst.

And Sal was wrong about me. I was changing in ways I didn't recognize. My weight was continuing to climb, no matter how little I ate. After the incident with the migraine, I'd final y succ.u.mbed to Robert Morgan's weekly examinations-not because I believed they would do any good, but because in the end, curiosity got me just as the because in the end, curiosity got me just as the doctor said it would. What if one day Robert Morgan did find a way to minimize me? I wondered. Wouldn't I take him up on his offer? I thought of Marcus, and my pulse quickened. If I could make it so that he could reach out and not up for my hand, wouldn't I do it? Of course I would.

These days, al I had to do was step on the scale, and both lead weights toppled al the way to the right. Robert Morgan scribbled the numbers in a folder, stil abiding by his agreement to keep the numbers to himself, and nodded. If I gained a pound or two, he would chuckle a little and write a line to himself, as if final y confirming some long-held suspicion. Then he always told me that stupid story about the hippo.

He kept an eye on every inch of me, il uminated every pore with his flashlight, stroking it up and down my skin like a lighthouse beam seeking out shipwrecks. "But, my G.o.d, you're ugly," he once stated, clicking off the penlight and squeezing the glands in my neck. "And that's a professional opinion. In fact, you're so G.o.dd.a.m.n off the charts that I had to order this." He produced a cardboard box and pul ed a blood pressure cuff out of it. "It's a leg cuff," he explained, "but we're going to just wrap it around here." He fastened the material around my biceps, inflated the cuff, and noted down what the little dial said. Then he got out his needle, tied rubber tubing where the blood pressure cuff had been, and proceeded to jab at my veins.

"What do you do with al of it, anyway?" I asked when he was done. He had six vials lined up in front of him. I daubed my forearm with cotton.

Robert Morgan capped the last tube.

"Not that you need to know, but it goes to a university lab. I'm starting to see some interesting results." I was tempted to ask what they were but didn't bother, for we had our agreement, and anyway, Robert Morgan was about as forthcoming with information as August had been when you asked him for the location of his favorite fishing hole.

"You'd tel me if I was dying, right?" I joked, turning my back and starting to gather my shapeless clothes. I stepped behind the three-part screen in the corner and threw my dress over my head, waiting for his reply.

When he final y answered, it was with al the humor of a corpse. "Why would I end a study just as it was getting good?"

My mouth fel open, and I stepped back around the screen. "Out of concern for the subject?" I suggested, my cheeks flaming with anger. "Because it would be the right thing to do? Because you're dealing with people, not rocks?"

Robert Morgan shook his head and stuck his pen in his breast pocket. "Don't worry, Truly -yet." He leaned forward, mouth agape in a jack-o'- lantern grin, and patted my arm before retreating to the safe harbor of his desk, leaving me sputtering mad.

"d.a.m.n doctors," I murmured, and stomped across the porch to the kitchen to char his Wednesday roast until it became one with the pan.

Hacking apart tomatoes for a sauce, I blinked back tears. It was hard to hurt me. Robert Morgan's needles didn't do it, and neither did the hot iron I'd singed my forearm along last week. Once, in August's barn, Hitching Post had reared up and landed square on my forefoot, but al I'd ended up with was a pretty, purple bruise and a broken toenail.

I was even getting used to my migraines. My body, it seemed, sponged up the world's pain like bread in the bottom of a gravy tray.

But I was unfamiliar with the kind of ache I was feeling now. It seemed to start in the center of me and steam outward until even the ends of my fingers tingled. I looked down and saw that I'd sliced my finger. A line of blood spurted out and mingled with the tomato pulp on the board. That explained the stinging. I glanced through the window and thought about going out to the doctor, but the thought of his fingers crawling on my flesh again gave me chil s.

Besides, I had a very different kind of remedy waiting for me in my own room, I realized. Without thinking twice, I swept the tomatoes-blood and al -in a pan and set them on the stove to stew. Then I threw down my knife and stomped upstairs to read Tabitha's quilt.

I had a choice, it seemed. The hand or the heart. The hand suggested touch, and therefore skin, to me, but the heart had to represent blood. I scowled, then decided to combine the two. But how? I wondered. In a tea? A pulp? Was I just meant to eat the leaves raw and whole? Tabby's embroidery didn't recommend a delivery system-just the raw ingredients. I studied the plants on the quilt some more. I didn't know al of them yet but could pick out comfrey, chickweed, and p.r.i.c.kly ash underneath the heart and hand. Wel , that would have to do, I thought. And even better, I could find them anywhere.

I wouldn't have to go out to the cemetery. In fact, that was one of the remaining mysteries of the quilt for me. Why had Tabitha included the jagged fence of Aberdeen's cemetery? Half the plants she'd sewn grew wil y-nil y anywhere you could spit in Aberdeen.

There was no need to trek al the way to the town graves. I tilted my head and stared at the quilt from a different angle. Maybe, I reasoned, the graveyard is simply the one place where all the plants grow. It was the answer I came back to again and again.

My eyes lingered on the tiny set of lips puckered over sprigs of peppermint and chamomile.

The mouth, I thought. Gateway to the stomach.

Peppermint was good for digestion. Almost everyone knew that. Then my heart leapt a little in my chest. What if Tabitha had known something more? I wondered. What if she could take away the appet.i.te as wel as cure it? I thought back to my humiliating examination with Robert Morgan. What if I could beat him at his own game? What would I need?

Peppermint, the quilt suggested, and chamomile.

Rosehips and dandelion greens. But would these make me hungrier? I had no idea. There was only one way to find out.

A pulp, I final y decided, would be the easiest thing to make for both my problems: the cut on my hand and the hunger rumbling in my stomach. I could mash up the respective stems and leaves, smearing one paste on my wound and infusing the other mixture into a sort of tea.

I waited until the household was asleep, then snuck into the garden by the light of the moon. I hadn't been outside at night in longer than I could remember, and the wet air was a welcome shock along the wal s of my throat. I inhaled in big, greedy gulps, my ears keening to the rol icking of crickets, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Up in the house, the doctor's window was stil il uminated, the curtains squeezed tight, so that the gla.s.s glowed in a m.u.f.fled way. I moved quickly, hoping he would attribute al the noise I was making to the restless shenanigans of a skunk or opossum.

Back in the kitchen, I found the mortar and pestle and mashed up handfuls of twigs and leaves into a slick green mess. "Truly?" The doctor's wooden voice floated down the stairs. "Is that you making al that ruckus?"

"Yes, Robert Morgan," I cal ed back, scooping the paste into a bowl. "I'm just fixing a little snack."

I thought I heard him sn.i.g.g.e.r, then the house fel silent again. The cut on my finger throbbed and oozed under its bandage, as if it were literal y crying out for a poultice. I ripped off the bandage and applied a generous blob, wincing against the heat that started to build up. I smeared more on and then more again and even daubed the burn on my forearm, then wrapped my hand in a clean dish towel, setting the empty bowl in the sink for the morning.

I poured boiling water over the second I poured boiling water over the second mixture and watched it cloud. A pleasant steam rose up from the rim of the cup, redolent with mint. I inhaled the vapor and took a cautious sip, expecting to taste bitterness, but not so much of it. I pul ed a face and tried another slurp, then poured the rest down my open throat.

That night I dreamed about my sister, but in my imagination she was al mixed up with Tabitha Morgan, her long hair tucked under a silk bonnet, her hips swathed in pleats of calico. She was laughing and spinning, and when I tried to reach out and touch her, she danced away from my grasp. "Wait," I cal ed, but she just spun faster and faster until the sprigs on her skirts turned into huge cabbage roses, and I woke to the cloying scent of their oils seeping under the crack in my window.

It was quite late. The sun was already up over the lilacs and headed toward the clouds. I sat up and unwound the dish towel from my hand. The green paste had hardened to a kind of glue, but when I rinsed it off in the bathroom sink, I found that the skin around my wound was puckered up as tight as a pair of lips for a kiss, and the place where the burn mark had been was pink and smooth once again. I flexed my hand and noted that the pain was gone as wel . The cut would almost certainly leave a scar, but that didn't bother me in the least. I could just add it to the list of al my body's other indignities.

I walked into the kitchen, whistling. The doctor was already at the table, legs crossed, sipping a gla.s.s of orange juice and perusing the morning paper. "What's that in the sink?" he asked.

He was either sneering or reacting to the lemon juice I'd mixed in with the orange juice-I couldn't tel which.

I hustled over to the sink and quickly swabbed the remaining paste out of the bowl.

"Nothing.

Just my snack from last night.

Remember?"

Robert Morgan snorted. He was definitely sneering, I decided. "What in heaven's acres was it? Looks like something you would have fed August's beat-up horses. Don't tel me you're on some kind of crazy diet. Because I doubt that much you do in that department wil ever help."

Anger crackled in my nostrils and ears like static. Inside my boots, I curled my toes, then did the same with my tongue. I would have liked nothing better than to tip the jug of juice over the doctor's head and watch it ooze down his col ar, but with a man like Robert Morgan, you were better off keeping your elbows close to your sides, your head down, and your feelings to yourself.

"A diet?" I echoed. "No, no. Nothing like that. Of course you're right, Robert Morgan. I was just trying a recipe that didn't work out, that's al ."

But he was uninterested in my explanation. Already, he was folding the paper back into thirds and shrugging on his coat, his mind racing ahead of him to the appointment book on his desk.

"It's going to be a hot one today, Truly,"

he crowed as he opened the back door. "Make sure you open al the windows."

I reached for the eggs. "Wait, don't you want your breakfast?"

"You have it. I'm not hungry." He swept across the porch, and I was alone once again save for the empty bowl in the sink and the odor of roses lingering like a sweet dare.

Chapter Eighteen.

I consider myself guilty of plenty of things, but probably not the crimes you'd a.s.sume. I don't regret sending Robert Morgan to meet the Maker, for instance. I don't regret it a bit. After al , it was his original idea. As for the other two souls I've doctored, wel , each case came with its own dark face for me to stare down.

Is what I've done right? Maybe. Some people in Aberdeen cal it a mercy. Some mutter that it's the doing of witches and devils-the work of Tabitha Morgan and her infernal quilt al over again.

And in a sense, they're correct. It is, after al , her recipes that I use, both for giving comfort and for darker purposes. But here's something I've never done-I've never made a decision for anyone one way or another. People come to me first and foremost, sometimes for healing, sometimes for more, but they are the ones who do the asking. Why don't I refuse? you might wonder. Why don't I just say, "No, I won't, end of story"?

Believe me, I think about it sometimes, Believe me, I think about it sometimes, but there is this to consider: There is the unrivaled power of death to even out the past. In particular, my past. I used to think I couldn't change my history, that the things that happened to me were as good as grooved in my bones, but each time I take a life, I find otherwise. I uncover another long-lost layer of my past, another strip of my soul.

Usual y, it's no mystery why someone wants life to end. Sickness, for the most part.

Sometimes debt, although I won't take those cases.

It's not my business to judge, only to determine. But I can't discount the weight of the past on the present moment-it's nothing I can see, but always there al the same, like an invisible stone sinking a ship. And it's never the people I suspect of meddling with the past who are guilty of it, either. Friend or foe, anyone is capable of scuttling a few innocent details, omitting one or two facts, and changing a life forever.

It's another thing entirely whether they choose to admit it.

Before I moved in with the doctor, I wouldn't have cal ed myself vengeful, but the longer I was under his roof, the more I began to feel spite tugging on my sleeve like a fitful child. Mostly it was because of the absence of my sister, which lingered in the house like a rank odor we al tried to ignore.

The doctor accomplished this by alternating vast periods of silence with harangues about my weight, my looks, my cooking, and my general existence.

"A big bird for a big woman," he snickered when I brought out the turkey I'd roasted for Thanksgiving. "Your sister always made Cornish hens, but I guess that would be nothing more than a light snack for the likes of you, Truly. Son"-he lifted up a piece of breast meat and turned to Bobbie -"pa.s.s your plate and prepare to be stuffed!" He chuckled a little at his seasonal joke, disregarding the tears hanging in the corners of Bobbie's eyes and completely overlooking the fact that Bobbie was stil getting over the loss of his mother.

"Thanks," Bobbie mumbled, his voice as dry as the meat on his plate, and then proceeded to eat nothing, not even the pumpkin pie or the fudge I'd made special for the day.

After every maddening meal, after every one of the doctor's humiliating medical exams, I took the opportunity to retreat to the warmth of my bedroom and Tabitha's quilt, studying its strange botanical whorls and lines while I tried to pound the malice inside me back down to a manageable bal .

Thanks to Marcus, I had become familiar with the names of the herbs, but the overal design of the thing stil puzzled me. The plants in the middle of the quilt were easy. Everything I expected to be there pretty much was. There was peppermint, and comfrey, sage, and lavender, borage, chamomile, and rosemary. Lined up in neat little rows, sewn demurely on neat white squares, they suggested a host of remedies. With Marcus's help, I had dried a measure of herbs in individual jars and stored them in the pantry next to the spices. During my quiet evenings, I went over the lists of plants and body parts I had made, trying to decode the quilt.

The st.i.tched eye stood for vision, I figured, so the herbs underneath it must have been good for sight.

I.

wrote down bilberries, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, and horsetail. And sure enough, when I developed a sty on my left eyelid, a poultice of these plants soon took down the swel ing. Encouraged by my success, I used the mixture I'd made for the cut on my own finger to soothe Bobbie's sc.r.a.ped knees, warning him not to tel his father. I hadn't yet gotten a chance to try any of the remedies underneath the quilt's bone, but I figured Tabitha had meant those plants to be used for fractures and breaks. Likewise, I was guessing that the heart stood for circulation and blood. The hand denoted skin to me, and the lips suggested eating and therefore the stomach. Every night before I went to sleep, I drank a cup of peppermint-chamomile tea, as the quilt suggested, and while my digestion was always just fine, I was sorry to find that the size of my appet.i.te remained the same.

The only motif I couldn't figure out were the wings that fluttered along the edges of the quilt.

Maybe they were just a decoration, I reasoned. Or maybe they meant nothing at al . The plants on the outskirts of the quilt certainly weren't as wel behaved as the ones in the middle. Actual y, they were more like weeds. They twisted and seethed, tangled their roots, seeds, and bulbs, and spread themselves into a snarl. Furthermore, not one of them could boast of anything but a bad reputation-like devil's trumpet, a white scoop of flower whose seeds could pickle a hippo. And there were hemlock leaves, and hippo. And there were hemlock leaves, and bel adonna, the oblong shapes of oleander leaves, and raggedy nightshade. Marcus had refused to dry any of these plants for me.

"I don't know what you're doing with al this stuff," he said, dumping a long fistful of rosemary on the kitchen counter, "but there's no way I'm bringing you a heap of hemlock leaves. Between you and the doctor, I don't know, one of you just might take it in mind to kil the other one. That's how Socrates committed suicide, you know, after the Athenians put him on trial."

A fluttering started up at the base of my skul right then, and for a moment I thought I might be coming down with one of my migraines, but an image of the quilt's unkempt border swam into my mind's eye, along with the pale host of wings, and with it came a clarity of understanding so sharp, it was almost eye splitting. I knew that hemlock was fatal from reading one of the herbal guides Marcus had brought me from the library, but it was also sometimes used as a sedative. And bel adonna and digitalis, just as deadly as hemlock, were also sometimes used for medicine. The art, of course, lay in getting the dose right. Or maybe not.

"Oh," I breathed, and reached out for the edge of the counter. "Oh, my goodness."

Marcus was immediately by my side, tender concern unfurling across his face. "What is it?" he asked, and lightly put one of his hands on the smal of my back.

I straightened up, surprised by how simultaneously familiar and strange his touch was.

Part of me wanted him to put his hand on my back again, but another piece of me was scared I would bust. I smoothed my ap.r.o.n over my hips. "Nothing.

Sorry. I'm fine. I just remembered something, that's al ."

Marcus looked at me quizzical y but then shoved his hat back on his head. He hesitated as if he wanted to say something more, but the moment pa.s.sed, and he flung the door open to the wind and the garden. A faint, moldy smel of compost trickled under my nose. It was the same smel I always caught out at the graveyard-an odor of burial and decay, but also of rejuvenation and life. A subject Tabitha Morgan had apparently known plenty about and which I was determined to learn.

We in Aberdeen are pure creatures of habit.

Sat.u.r.days, for instance, are for gardening committee meetings and library outings. Fridays are street-sweeping days. Wednesday is garbage col ection, and on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Aberdeen was praying, or sleeping, or loading leather bags of golf clubs into the trunks of their cars, I got a chance to reunite with Amelia. Sunday mornings were her hours to clean Robert Morgan's clinic, but we always took the opportunity to flap our gums a little afterward and catch up.

She brought her own equipment from the farm-buckets, mops, and dusters and bleach, vinegar, and baking soda. Amelia held no faith in modern concoctions for the household. She simply cleaned the way her mother had-with lemon oil, and salt, and old-fashioned elbow grease. Stil , as a concession to the doctor's medical ways, she consented to swabbing the floors and surfaces of the consented to swabbing the floors and surfaces of the examining room with the pine-scented disinfectant he ordered from one of his catalogs, her face screwed up in protest the whole time and both windows thrown open.

After work, she always sat in the kitchen with me to drink a cup of bitter coffee, the steam rol ing over the rims of the mugs and misting up our eyes until everything looked better. It was a trick we'd learned at the farm-an optical il usion of necessity that was stil serving us wel . Amelia would give me the news, and the worst news of al came on the day she told me that she'd had Hitching Post put down.

I sloshed coffee on the table. I'd been living at the doctor's house for four years by then, and of course some things around town had changed, but not as much as you might imagine. The firehouse bel s stil clogged up in the summer. The newspaper stil had the same masthead, and even the neighborhood dogs and cats rarely ventured away from their haunts. An image of Hitching Post's crooked forelegs and swayback rose up so powerful y in my mind that I could almost believe he was standing before me, runny nostrils and al . I had almost come to think of him as an extension of the barn, I realized. I took a slurp of coffee. "What was wrong with him?"

Amelia sighed. "He was starting to go lame, and we just couldn't take it anymore. Besides, hay isn't so cheap. And Ma's getting older, and I don't like the horses. Never have."

I bit my lip. "Stil ."

"It was quick, though. One bul et. And then we buried him."

I frowned. "Where?"

"Right next to Dad."

At that, my lips twitched. I pictured August in the underworld, frantical y juggling chits and bets, inviting al comers. "He would have liked that."

Amelia smiled, too. "I know." She lapsed into silence, then swil ed the rest of her coffee and slid her red bandanna off her hair. The doctor made her wear it. He was particular and didn't like her to drop any hairs in his clinic. Sunday was Amelia's longest day, but she got paid by the hour, so the additional labor meant extra cash. More than that, she enjoyed the extended period of quiet it granted her.

In spite of Miss Sparrow's years of torturous dictations and elocution lessons, Amelia never did become a chatterbox. Far from it. In fact, as if to spite Miss Sparrow and prove herself the victor, Amelia general y spoke only under duress- sometimes even with me. That's why cleaning suited her so wel , for it al owed her the time and s.p.a.ce to pay attention to life's tiniest details, leaving nothing undusted, nothing unscrubbed. The thing about cleaning for Amelia was that it was a delicate business. People wanted their s.p.a.ces made fresh and new, but they also didn't want anyone snooping around in their personal dirt, and that was the true genius of Amelia. She could give the il usion that absolutely nothing had been touched, nothing moved -that the sparkling light fixtures and gleaming tabletops simply happened by magical accident- even while she turned entire rooms upside down.

Precision was particularly important for the doctor. Once, Amelia moved a canister of cotton bal s from the left to the right side of the counter in his examining room, and Robert Morgan met her at the clinic door the next Sunday, his jaw locked up tighter than Fort Knox. "Do you see the order in which these are arranged?" he asked, pointing to the gla.s.s containers of cotton bal s, cotton swabs, tongue depressors, and individual y packaged alcohol swabs. He spoke slowly and loudly, as if Amelia were stupid or from a foreign country, but she was used to that. It was the way most people spoke to her.

Amelia nodded and gave Robert Morgan the thumbs-up sign. "No problem," she croaked. "It won't happen again."

Her chapped voice surprised Robert Morgan, but I knew her better than he did. For Amelia, words were something to use sparingly.

They were like vinegar or bleach. A tiny amount could clean up almost anything, but dump out more than that, and you could have one unG.o.dly mess on your hands.

After that incident, Amelia was more careful to measure the distance of the canisters from the counter's edge, to put the doctor's chair back in exactly the same spot, and to memorize the order of the books on the shelves before she restacked the books on the shelves before she restacked them. Amelia loved books, and other people's books offered a world of information above and beyond what was printed on their pages. I never would have guessed, for instance, that the ancient Reverend Pickerton and his wife were hiding a copy of the Kama Sutra under their bed or that the twin-setted Vi Vickers checked trashy science fiction novels out of the library. "They're for my son," she said, blushing, when Amelia ran her duster over the stack of them. "He just keeps them on my desk." But Amelia said nothing. What was it to her if Vi Vickers wanted to lose herself in Amazon s.p.a.ce warriors?

Robert Morgan's shelves, however, harbored no such indiscretions. With the doctor, what you saw was what you got, and after Amelia perused the books once, she quickly grew tired of looking at cross-sectioned il ustrations of internal organs. I've often thought that people would be better off if they left nature wel alone, but I guess it's a matter of personal preference. Amelia, for example, used no cosmetics, dressed in a black skirt and white top every day, and hadn't even trimmed her hair in six years. Nevertheless, the skin on her cheeks was as taut and shiny as an apple, and her eyes were as clear as wel water.